Charm of the Bogeyman
by skyspireskit3
Summary: Tiana meets the Shadowman at a bar. One-shot.


Disclaimer: Not mine.

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Tiana shuffles home under a bad moon. Her feet drag as if mired in swamp mud. The breeze chills her sweat-damp uniform and sweeps the tired sand from her eyes. The clamor of the day still wracks her brain in firecracker bursts. She can't go home yet, so she veers off the road to Pearl's, hoping to find a snatch of quiet in which she can untangle. Distant, pearly jazz smokes the twilight.

She pushes through the doors, past regulars buried in the dimness, looking to drown themselves. Not her crowd, but she's here for the atmosphere. The harmony of clinking ice, the soft tiptoe of piano keys. She makes her way to the warm firefly glow at the bar and slides onto a stool to nurse her bruised dream, which on days like this seems as far away as Venus. Pearl, the bottle redhead behind the counter, sidles her bulk over and asks for an order.

"Just water." Tiana says. She's sipping it when a strange glass nudges her elbow. Her neck laid bare by her waitress ponytail, she feels the back of it prickle before she even turns.

Beside her at the counter just a few feet away. Whip-lean body coiled into a scythe. His smile the flourish of the Devil's penstroke. "Buy you a drink?"

Dr. Facilier. The Shadowman.

A drawstring of fear tightens around her heart, but her voice comes out steady. "No, no thanks. I'm good."

His voice is smooth liqueur, the purr of a cat lapping cream. "Oh, c'mon now. No reason to be afraid of ol' Dr. Facil-"

Blunt as a knife chop: "I know." The mantra of childhood: _Beware the Shadowman._ The stories are lore: he's immortal, he once swapped his soul for a demon's third eye, he cavorts at night through graveyards and makes the bones sit up and dance. But that's all they are. Stories. And it's been a long time since she's had the patience for those. "Everybody knows who you are."

"Mn. And your Aunt always knew it was you who lost her brooch in the swamp."

She chokes, sputtering disbelief. He lifts a brow. "First time drinkin'?"

(His offered glass is back in his hand, when did he reach for it?)

"Very funny." She wipes her mouth savagely. Her hands aren't shaking. They're _not_.

It's as if he's stepped down from another realm, or out from one below. He haunts the margins; he's the oil seeping between the cracks. By some trick of her heavy eyes and the muted lights, his shadow seems to leer from the wall. "What're you doing here?" she asks.

Staring into his drink as is if he's reading a Tarot future, "Same thing you are. Tryin' to forget."

Maybe it's because he's the first man she's really spoken to in a long while, a man not shouting for refills or scoffing at her from behind toxins of burning eggs. Tiana reaches for her own glass again and it moves, sliding down the counter to his hand. Of its own accord. His necklace of fangs gleams.

"You almost choke," he says, "and just now you wanna do it again? I'll decide when you can have it back."

Anger-laced shock founts in her throat, but with it rises something else. Her virginity has always been a barrier, prophylactic to distractions. She is a sealed bullet, aimed for something greater than the fate of a candleflame, at the mercy of another's breath. But the room feels stifling, heady with perfidious intrigue. The music rolls over in a slow tide, buffeting her towards him.

His eyes: portals into exotic worlds. Hypnotic as a cobra's. Promising a place where, for one night, she can forget about hard work and impossible dreams and dead stars. Where she can believe again in magic. She can feel the velvet snare of his spell around her, but that's not what makes her shiver. What has her chest in a cold clutch is that, sitting here now, she feels she could willingly put her hand between those jaws, let that poison into her veins.

What's happening? What's in this _drink?_ But she looks and it's just water, tepid and plain from the tap.

She has to get out of there.

"Hey, I got this." A thin plume of purple smoke from his long fingers, it's not_, not_ her imagination, and in his palm silver coins that weren't there before glint sharply, clattering onto the counter.

She leaves, his smile branded on her back.

She runs the last quarter-mile home.


End file.
